NATHAN & JESSIE: I’m at Home

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By the time a duo reaches its eighth album, there is a particular kind of temptation to settle in. Nathan Rivera and Jessie Andra Smith seem far more interested in wandering.

On I’m at Home, Nathan & Jessie sound like musicians who have spent years collecting musical languages wherever the road has taken them—gypsy jazz, folk, blues, country, Latin music, hints of reggae, and sounds that seem to have wandered in from somewhere beyond the familiar borders of American roots music. Yet the record never feels like a collection of souvenirs. These influences have been lived with long enough to become part of the duo’s own vocabulary.

That vocabulary begins with an unusual instrumental palette. Resonator guitars converse with violin and accordion. Slide guitar whistles and sighs. Upright piano occasionally stumbles in like the last musician still awake in an old saloon. Nathan & Jessie’s voices move easily around one another, their harmonies earthy and unvarnished, less concerned with pristine symmetry than with the warmth of two people sharing the same musical space.

“Skin to Skin” establishes that restlessness immediately. Guitar and violin enter together with a piercing melody that carries traces of Mediterranean music and tango before settling into something resembling gypsy jazz filtered through emotive indie folk. Beneath it is a distinctly human contradiction: the impulse toward independence wrestling with the desire to be known completely. “I can talk myself out of anything,” they sing, but some desires resist explanation. Eventually we still reach for one another—human to human, skin to skin.

That awareness of time and connection runs throughout the record. “Shoot Shoot” has the easy bounce of wisdom passed from parent to child: life is going to shoot right by you, whether you are paying attention or not. Its buoyant folk rhythm and whistling slide guitar lend the song an almost island-like ease, allowing the warning to arrive without becoming a lecture.

Elsewhere, I’m at Home becomes wonderfully strange. “Blue’s Song” pairs intimate picking and pizzicato violin with droning accordion and wandering melodic colors, creating something whimsical, ethereal, and faintly mystical. Its childlike question—“Where does Blue go when it rains? When it pours?”—captures one of Nathan & Jessie’s greatest strengths: their willingness to remain curious.

Even familiar territory is allowed to change. “Maria,” previously heard on 2019’s You’re the Star, returns transformed. Where the earlier recording carried the bright pulse of traditional Mexican ranchera, this version slips into a minor key. Led by bouncing accordion, it feels moodier and more weathered, equally at home on a rain-soaked street in Paris or New Orleans. “Buddy,” meanwhile, reaches toward honky-tonk, recalling the plainspoken charm of Hank Williams and early Willie Nelson.

Then comes the title track, and the wandering stops.

“I’m at Home” strips everything down to voices, warm storytelling, and a junky upright piano that sounds as though it has been sitting in the corner of the room for a hundred years. After an album so geographically and musically restless, the simplicity feels revealing.

Perhaps that is the quiet joke buried in the title. For musicians who have built their lives on the road, home need not be a fixed address. It can be a song, an old instrument, a story told again, or another voice meeting yours in harmony.

Eight albums in, Nathan & Jessie still sound eager to discover what might be waiting around the next corner. They just seem increasingly certain of what they’re carrying with them.